3,634

Tom Slee has a weblog, and says:

Whimsley: A response to Alex Tabarrok: Update 2: The other day I was pleased that my amazon.com Sales Rank was around 42,000. It is now 3634 - entirely due to the review...

Alex Tabarrok's reading Tom Slee's No One Makes Your Shop at Wal-Mart and consequent throwing the book against the wall and desiring to kick Tom Slee in the shins has boosted Tom's book's amazon.com sales rank by a factor of ten.

If it will boost the book's ranking further, I will promise to throw one of my two copies out my sixth-floor office window and to trap Tom Slee in the Evans Hall middle south elevator for no less than thirty minutes--it is a very nice book. Almost as nice as Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter.) And good anti-market books defending social democracy in this neoliberal age are scarce (bad books are plentiful).

Such books deserve to be rewarded by the market. Let's see how we can do...

Comments

[Steve]

I haven't finished it yet, and so far I don't think all of its points are well taken, but it is a very good popular introduction to game theory.

[kevin quinn]

Serendipitously, I just wrote a final exam for a principles course with a question that asked them, in so many words, to describe the prisoner's dilemma faced by consumers who value both a thriving downtown as well as cheap prices. Is this sort of argument in Slee's book?

[Andy]

Yep, that's pretty much the title example. Wal-Mart itself isn't analyzed in depth (it's a concepts book), but the stylized game-theoretic treatment is there. A fine book, I agree.